12 Hours of Santos

Last weekend Wifey and I headed back down to FL for the second time in a month for a twelve hour race. After my less then ideal showing at the first one (Oleta) I had mixed feelings heading down again....but the way I look at these couple of races is a little different then most racers/riders doing them.

I guess the best way of putting it is I treat this races as training rides, a way to test out new things on the nutrition/equipment front and to kickoff changing gears on the training front. Since our racing season does not really get kicking until Aprilish I'm not looking to get into a knife fight and/or burn one of the few matches I have this early in the year....besides, with these guys coming into their peaks right now (not that they ever really aren't) at best I'm bringing a knife to a gunfight.

Ok, enough of me running my mouth. The week before the race I was debating on signing up for the singlespeed class....let's say the debate was over once I pulled the geared bike of the hook to clean it up for the race.....singlespeed it is.

So after a short trip to meet some news friends:
I wanted to get in a preride of the course to check out the bike/and gearing. Sadly that did not happen, let's say that Wifey is no Magellan and leave it at that...cuz if not I may get smothered with a pillow tonight. So off to the hotel and dinner we went, which was cool because I got to meet Sebastian for the first time (other then watching him ride circles around me.)

After setting up our ghetto pit we heading down to the lemans start, and for some reason I convinced myself it would be best if I did not kill it on the run (figured since I'd be on a SS I did not want to be "that guy" holding up the geared racers at the start.) Not my greatest idea ever, even with the couple hundred meter run and dirt road start it took half a lap to get thin things out. But once I got to keep the cadence I wanted to thou I was like a fat kid eating cake...the 32x18 I was running was perfect. It's always cool to be on a SS and pass riders on geared bikes on climbs....or better yet, make climbs they even can't.

As normal the first few hours were a blur, but around the four hour mark the lack of riding the SS was beating on me...the upper body was getting worked alot more the normal with the short power climbs. An hour later I pulled/threw my chain off and thought it'd be cool to try and remove a fingertip putting it back on. But thanks to full fingered gloves and the fingernail it was just a sweet cut and blood, not that I knew at the time thou.

An hour later I ran into Wifey in the ghetto pit, she was having far from a good day. She had gone down a couple times and was just mentally out of it, not that's she's right mentally right in the first place....I mean she did marry me. So with that being said I told her to go finish her lap and I'd back up the fort.....after all, six hours on the bike is still six hours on the bike (and this time of year I'm happy with that.....besides, we had a cooler full of beer that was not gonna drink itself.)

Sunday morning we went over to Ormond Beach and did part of my old road loop for a recovery ride:
and I did get yelled at a couple of times for trying to chase down roadies that came by. But with a midway point like this how could it not be a good ride:

Want to say thanks to the Goneriding crew for as always putting on a great event, and maybe next year I'll bring more then a B game....or maybe I'll just take up basket weaving.